


After Everything

by sariagray



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Death, Children, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Other, POV Mary Morstan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 04:10:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1926216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sariagray/pseuds/sariagray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, things happen. Sometimes, those things happen to good people, and everyone else is left picking up the pieces. Mary and Sherlock begin to navigate the aftermath. A brief piece on grief and moving forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Special love/thanks to analineblue for beta'ing for me. 
> 
> There was a prompt for this story; I don't remember where I saw it, either the kinkmeme or the Monday Prompts. I scrolled past it, looking for already-written fic to read, and let the idea gnaw away at me for over a month. I can't find the prompt now, but please let me know if it was you, so that I can give you credit!
> 
> I haven't written anything in almost a year. It feels good to dip my toes back in it.
> 
> (I was also really set on naming this "John Dies At The Beginning," but I didn't.)

**After Everything**

 

Mary takes one step back, and clenches her hand into a fist over her stomach. She feels so large now, she’s due in less than a month. In less than a month, she’ll have a little girl, a tiny human, with John’s eyes or nose or hair or all of it together. The thought makes her stomach turn, and she presses her newly-made fist to her mouth.

 

She takes another step back, steps on something unyielding – a foot. She turns.

 

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, quietly, as she looks up.

 

Sherlock is pale, just a shade or two more than normal, and his face is stonier than usual. He looks, at least to Mary, like a marble statue, a death mask.

 

He nods. He puts a hand on her shoulder – to steady her, to stop her, to offer support, she isn’t sure. Just a week ago, she could read him so well. She shuffles a bit until she’s next to him, or until he’s next to her. Her eyes are blurry, but she refuses to cry. Not now. Not in front of all of these people.

 

Outside, it is not appropriately overcast, nor is it ironically bright and cheerful. It is somewhere between the two – a sort of whiteness, a blankness of weather. But there is wind, and the promise of rain in the late evening, and it looks like unseasonable temperatures tomorrow. She doesn’t remember if the forecast said unseasonably warm or unseasonably cool.

 

The baby kicks, and Mary instinctively rubs her stomach.

 

They haven’t picked out a name. They hadn’t even talked about it, not really, not beyond jokes about things like “Hermione” (her) or “Mrs. Hudson” (John). She remembers that night well, John with adrenaline in his veins, and her feeling like she was incandescent with joy. The last bits of Moriarty’s web, those strands that clung to the corners of the doorframe, had been swept away for good, and Sherlock was home, also for good, and Mrs. Hudson had made scones for the three of them at half past two in the morning, bless her.

 

“That’s it!” John had said, grinning at the two of them (Sherlock flopped on his chair, Mary spread comfortably on the sofa). “We’ll name her Mrs. Hudson!”

 

They’d laughed, then. Uproariously, maybe a little hysterically. And Mary had shaken her head, and Sherlock had said he thought it was a fine name.

 

Now, in the musty church, the same one where she was married not so very long ago, she grabs Sherlock’s hand and presses it to her belly. She can feel him flinch, the way his wrist almost clicks with hesitation.

 

“Mrs. Hudson,” she whispers. “I feel like a fool. What’s her first name?”

 

“Martha,” he manages. His voice sounds soft, and dry, and so very fragile.

 

She nods, once, decisively, though a small part of her is surprised that he knew.

 

They don’t go up to pay their last respects. Mary knows that Sherlock finds the concept imbecilic (though, she suspects, “imbecilic” has long stood for “too painful"), and she herself doesn’t appreciate the finality of “last.” (Though it is, it is. The last. The end.) Instead, they stand there at the front, Mary’s fingers clasping Sherlock’s wrist, Sherlock’s palm flat against the curve of her stomach. They must look, she thinks, like some perverse religious iconography.

  

* * *

 

Mary can’t drink, not yet, not for a few more weeks, but she watches Sherlock sip slowly at something blood red in a glass without an ounce of envy. (Okay. Perhaps an ounce. Maybe two.) She gulps down water, herself, as though it will clear the dust from her mouth and throat.

 

“After everything…” Sherlock starts, for the third (fourth? fifth?) time. “He’s…war, he’s been shot. He’d been shot.” He swallows the rest of his drink and pours more from the dark bottle. “Moriarty and Magnussen and…and everything. After everything.”

 

Mary watches him, carefully. She’d been warned, of course, of the slippery slope – she’d helped retrieve him from a drug den, after all. Still, Sherlock is talking and drinking his grief, and that’s…well, it seems normal enough, for a few hours after a funeral.

 

At hospital, when it was still touch-and-go, when there was still a sliver of hope, he’d been manic and furious and full of a power that both terrified and reassured her. He’d demanded. And then it was too late – too late for demands to mean anything, too late for desperate pleas to elder brothers or gods.

 

A traffic accident, an honest-to-god accident. Sherlock has the right of it – after _everything_. After everything, just a bloody accident, and then he ( _John_ ) was gone ( _dead_ ). Mary feels her heart stop again, flip uncomfortably. She closes her eyes tight against it, as though that will make everything go away.

 

“You’ll stay,” Sherlock says suddenly.

 

She opens her eyes. “I didn’t bring anything, everything’s back…”

 

Sherlock shakes his head. He looks surprisingly sober, clear-headed, his eyes bright with determination rather than unshed tears. “I mean,” he says, “you’ll move in here. You’ve set up her cot in your room – you can both stay in my room and when she gets older, she can take John’s old room, and I’ll…I don’t spend much time in there, anyway. I prefer the sofa.”

 

“You loved him,” she finds herself saying, and then takes a deep breath. “You love him.”

 

Sherlock refuses to look at her, and his hands flap unmoored in front of his face. “I – it’s – he never….”

 

“You and I, we could never love each other,” she says, gently. “Not the way either of us loved him.”

 

“No.” He looks relieved. “No, but that’s not – it’s not about that. I care for you, and I – I want. No, not that.”

 

Mary laughs at the look of shock on his face. It feels good, light, for just a moment – before it begins to sound like choking. She takes another hasty gulp of water.

 

“You want to help raise the daughter of the man you loved,” she offers, then gives a go at chuckling. “Sherlock Holmes taking care of a baby. That’s – well, that’s…yeah.”

 

She doesn’t say it meanly, or at least she doesn’t intend for it to be mean. In fact, she finds it astonishing in the same way that sunsets are astonishing.

 

He nods, so he must take it as intended. “Yes,” he breathes, and it sounds like the only thing he’s ever wanted (and god, her heart aches for how much that isn’t true). “Mycroft can arrange everything. The move, I mean. The…move.”

 

Mary leans further back against the sofa. It feels strange when she thinks about it, that this piece of furniture feels more like _hers_ than anything she’s ever picked out herself.

 

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, there are going to be ground rules, there’s a lot to discuss, but…yes, okay.”

 

He makes no grand gesture; he does not move to curl up next to her, or put his ear against her stomach (she’s so uncomfortable, she’d probably smack him if he tried), or kiss her cheek. Instead he closes his eyes and nods as though to himself.

 

“Okay,” he echoes. “Yes, okay.” And then he pours himself another drink.

 

-End-


End file.
